Fishing Report 2/15/09

Here’s a mid-February fishing report . . . and it’s not pretty . . . as my empty-net photo depicts.

Temperatures were so cold in January that a lot of shelf ice developed. February was kinder. We got a real nice week-long thaw early on, with air temperatures actually hitting the low fifties. Even with the heat wave and direct sunlight, it still took 3 days of thaw just to bust up the shelf-ice. I finally got my courage up on theEmpty Net fourth day of the thaw, and got into the Sturgeon 3 days in a row. Each trip was about 2 hours in length, timed for the warmest part of the day, and proved equally effective. Not a single hook-up.

On the first and second days, water temps never moved above 32F. It wasn’t until the third day that I saw temperatures bump up to about 33 ½. Naturally, after 6 days of tropical weather, the snow started to do a funny thing. It melted, and raised the river level by 8 inches. With all that snow melt, came muddy water. So, even though I was starting to get some decent water temps, the river mucked over making for tough sledding.

By comparison, last year, January and early February were unusually warm. Water temps in the 35F to 38F were typical. As a consequence, a two-hour outing with 2 or 3 hook-ups was not uncommon. What a difference 3 or 4 degrees can make.

With the sun climbing higher into the sky each day, river temps will be on the rise. As long as we don’t get a whole bunch more nights dropping down into the “teens”, we ought to start seeing a slow, but definite trend toward better fishing.